NOAH'S MARK.

On June 4, 1800, Noah Webster, a sometime schoolteacher, failed lawyer, and staggeringly successful spelling-book author, placed an ad in the back pages of a Connecticut newspaper, just above notices of a sailor's death, a shoe sale, and a farmer's reward for a stray cow. The sailor had drowned; the cheap shoes were "Ladies' Morocco"; the red milch cow had "a white face and large teats." And Webster, who was forty-two, had plans to compile a "Dictionary of the American Language."

"It is found that a work of this kind is absolutely necessary," Webster announced, hoping to drum up advance orders, "on account of considerable differences between the American and English language." The American people had declared independence and constituted their own government. Now they needed their own dictionary, a place to put, and look up, all the new words they had coined--Americanisms like "lengthy," a good word to describe both the dictionary and the amount of time it would take Webster to finish it. Seventy thousand entries and a quarter century later, in 1825, he wrote his last definition, much to the relief of his wife and seven children and, toward the end, the grandchildren who stomped up and down the stairs while he toiled away, A to Z, in a study whose walls had been packed with sand to keep out the noise of even their whispers. (Although, for those brave enough to open his study door, Webster stocked a desk drawer with raisins and peppermints.)

Whether it was worth it is hard to say. But Webster's dictionary rewarded him with the kind of immortality reserved for only a handful of writers: embossed in gold on faux-leather book spines, his name shimmers from the shelves of every American library; dog-eared paperback copies of Webster's have been lost and found under dormitory mattresses from Amherst to Berkeley; and chances are that Webster lives on, unseen, on your hard drive, waiting for your need to know the meaning of "jobbernowl."

But Webster's fame was always strange, even before he died, in New Haven in 1843, at the age of eighty-four. Outside his family, nearly everyone who knew him found him in-suffer-able, and strangers who thought they admired him usually didn't: they'd mistaken him for another Webster, the fiery orator and Massachusetts senator. (If he had published an autobiography, it would have been called "I Am Not Daniel!") This year marks the bicentennial of Webster's first dictionary, the granddaddy of them all. In 1806, Webster published a small volume of brisk definitions ("Dic'tionary, n. a book of words explained in alphabetical order"), not much bigger than your average "Pocket Webster's." Its anniversary has come and nearly gone, unobserved except at a handful of bookstore chats and spelling bees hosted by the Merriam-Webster publishing company. Webster, a pessimist who gave the En-glish language the word "demoralize," might have predicted as much.

Maybe it's just as well that no one remembers that first Webster's: its debut was a debacle, a casualty of the checkered politics of the new nation. It failed because of who Webster was, a conservative with liberal ideas, living in a recklessly partisan age. Only after what Webster stood for no longer mattered, only after Americans had begun to forget who he was, did his dictionaries succeed. Web'ster, n. a dictionary. But Webster? Webster who?

In June of 1800, Noah Webster's proposal for an American dictionary made national news. No news might have been better. Within a week, a Philadelphia newspaper editor called Webster's idea preposterous (it is "perfectly absurd to talk of the American language") and his motives mercenary ("the plain truth is . . . that he means to make money"). Two American dictionaries, published just months before, had been badly drubbed, too. The first promised "a number of words in vogue not found in any dictionary." One reviewer, dismissing "sans culotte," "hauter," and "composuist" as, respectively, French, not even a word, and just plain silly, deemed the dictionary "at best, useless." No better were notices of the Massachusetts minister Caleb Alexander's "Columbian Dictionary," containing "Many NEW WORDS, peculiar to the United States." "A disgusting collection" of idiotic words coined by "presumptuous ignorance," one critic wrote, referring to Americanisms like "wigwam," "rateability," "caucus," and "lengthy" (lengthy? what's next, "strengthy"?). "The Co-lumbian Dictionary," as he saw it, was nothing more than "a record of our imbecility."

You might think it would be hard to top that kind of clobbering, at least without thumbing through a ...